6 replies to this topic

[Beaver]

Just wanted to share a technique I came up with for making that "lcd screen closeup" look. I wanted something that looked like you were shooting a closeup of a real LCD as opposed to a flat boring plane. Here's how it looks in the end:



The technique is pretty simple, and consists mainly of placing a texture over the main image (using multiply mode), tweaking the opacity, and maybe adding a little lighting/shading to finish it off. Here's the texure I made to get this effect (it's tiny!):



And I'm just using the motion tile filter to repeat it over the whole website image. I've also added some blur and mosaic to the image and address type to make it look a little pixelated. I've found that if you do two layers of the texture and offset the depth a little you get all kinds of cool/weird moire effects when the camera animates. That's all!

[Sao_Bento]

Nice look. Thanks for sharing the technique.

[shiftypixel]

Yes, it looks very good. Thanks. Quite useful, too.

[JoelD]

Quite nice.

Don't know if you have the free "Pete's plugins" set which has "TV Pixel" included.
Another way to quickly get close to that look. I usually set to color dodge and maybe a hint of starblur.

May be totally obvious and posted in resources somehwere, but just in case heres the link

http://www.petewarde...m#After Effects

[Phil]

Never thought about motion tiling the lil LCD mask, that's a goodie. My issue has always been getting the pixels nice and big and keeping them proper sqaures as AE always wants to resample any layer that's scaled over 100% and ends up blending them together.

The only way I've managed to get over it is by precomping the layer you want zoomed, throw it into a 3D app as a background texture and then rendering it out to 6x the resolution making sure that you tell the 3D app not to the resample texture. You end up with a monster sized sequence but at least each pixel is now a 6x6 pixel square which looks great close up. Bung your LCD mask over that and bonza!

[BruceSmith]

Hello Beaver,

Thanks for sharing your technique regarding the LCD.
I am not the photographer so the information you provided is great help.
It is really looks cool. I will try it soon.

[Todd Kopriva]

Never thought about motion tiling the lil LCD mask, that's a goodie. My issue has always been getting the pixels nice and big and keeping them proper sqaures as AE always wants to resample any layer that's scaled over 100% and ends up blending them together.

The only way I've managed to get over it is by precomping the layer you want zoomed, throw it into a 3D app as a background texture and then rendering it out to 6x the resolution making sure that you tell the 3D app not to the resample texture. You end up with a monster sized sequence but at least each pixel is now a 6x6 pixel square which looks great close up. Bung your LCD mask over that and bonza!

A much easier way to accomplish this is to set the layer quality to draft.

My approach to the overall LCD-looking result is to scale the layer by a factor of N with quality of the layer set to draft. For the color separation, I applied the Separate RGB effect from Satya Meka. Then overlay a 75% opacity instance of a solid with the Grid effect applied,with its width and height set to N.

As always, there are many ways to do any one thing in After Effects.

Edited by Todd Kopriva, 21 November 2009 - 03:40 PM.